Gansey Nation

First of all, apologies to anyone who tried to access the site on Sunday 27th. I’m afraid we were hacked again by another bunch of Middle Eastern crazies (their motto: ‘Bringing down decadent western imperialism, one knitting blog at a time!’). Anyway, Margaret and her friends in the US did their best Captain Philips impersonations and repelled the invaders with water cannon and barbed wire, and we’re back in business, at least for now.

This week’s blog is mostly about knitting the neck and shoulders, so perhaps you should go make yourself a strong coffee at this point and soak a towel to wrap around your head. (Warning: blog may contain some mild maths, bad language and cartoon violence.) Ready? Sure? All right, here we go.

As you’ll see from the (pretty lousy, but Margaret will be back soon) photos, I’ve done quite a lot of knitting this week. This is largely down to jet lag, which has filled my head with something like cotton wool and morphine, and has left me tired and remarkably stupid. (This week’s highlights included putting the laundry and detergent in the drier instead of the washing machine and switching it on; and also carefully setting my breakfast tray of porridge on the floor, removing my slippers, and then turning round and treading in the bowl. It’s like being a possession horror movie, where it turns out the house was built on the ancient burial ground of Laurel and Hardy.)

The completed back

Anyway, to business: I’ve finished the right shoulder, including the ridge and furrow shoulder strap, and just have to join the two halves together before moving on to the left shoulder. (You can of course put the shoulder stitches on a holder at this point and go ahead and do the other half; then do the whole joining/casting off thing for both shoulders at one go. It doesn’t matter: I just find it easier to join each half as soon as it’s completed.)

I follow the traditional practice of dividing each side of the gansey (i.e., front and back) equally into 3 sections at this point (left shoulder, neck, right shoulder); therefore, as I have 204 stitches, that gives each of these sections 68 stitches.

Close up of right front shoulder

As the dedicatee requested a relatively deep neckline I decided to make the neck a whole tree deep, consisting of 32 rows. If I decrease 1 stitch every 2 rows that’s a total of 16 decreases. So, I took 16 stitches from the central neck section, and added it to the right shoulder, giving me 84 stitches on the needle (68 + 16 = 84). By the time I reached the shoulder strap I had made 16 decreases and was back to the correct number of stitches on the needle (68, for those still awake), to match those on the back shoulder strap top which it will be joined. Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished the other shoulder, and maybe even the collar.

Happy days – autumn on the Cape

In other news, it’s shameless self-promotion time again. My Victorian detective story, The Cuckoo’s Nest, is on a free promotion on Amazon kindle till Friday. It’s the one of my books that’s sold the most copies and received the best reviews, so if you’re idly curious and would like to give it a go, now’s your chance. In fact, let’s be honest, it would be rude not to.

Now it’s time to man the water cannon and prepare to sell our lives dearly as we await the next cyber-attack. And if you’re uncertain about whether the site has been hacked or not, here’s a simple test: mildly irreverent persiflage about life, the universe and stitch gauges – that’s probably us; extreme propaganda about the condition of the Middle East and global jihad – well, that could still be us, to be fair, but best to assume it’s hackers unless they also mention 5-ply.

Well, just when you think it can’t get any worse, what with network crashes and servers not responding and all, our website was hacked on Sunday night by some group campaigning for a Saharan republic. (I can tell you, they just lost my vote!)

Quite why they think the readers of a blog about knitting fishermen’s sweaters would make likely converts to their cause, I am unable to say. (Though for all I know knitted hump-warmers in 5-ply for The Camel Who Has Everything may be all the rage in the desert these days.)

It was a bit of a shock, to be honest. But—and this is the strange part—the new web page actually had the courtesy to tell us it had been hacked, and by whom. It was a bit like being mugged by Jeeves (“Excuse me, sir, I’m most awfully sorry, but I really must ask you if you wouldn’t mind terribly handing over your wallet”).

Anyway, luckily we’d just switched service providers to one that offered better tech support (though what we really require is something more like a Samaritans hotline), and we keep regular backups, so it was a relatively simple matter to restore the site.

But what with one thing and another it’s been a very frustrating few weeks, and has turned the blog from something which was just supposed to be a bit of light-hearted fun into Really Not A Lot of Fun At All, especially for Margaret (who could be seen up on the roof most nights dressed in a white coat waiting for a lightning storm and shouting, “Give my creature LIFE!”).

Well. Hopefully everything is sorted once and for all and we can say, like D.H. Lawrence, “Look! We have come through!” (A book title sniffily dismissed by one critic in the phrase: “They may have come through, but why should we look?”)

Twenty-nine hours of train travel gives you lots of time to knit.

Meanwhile, I soldier on. By straining every sinew I can just about manage a tree a week, about 2.75 inches: and to my surprise and delight yesterday I managed to finish the first half of the gussets and divide front and back. So I’m now romping up the back, only another couple of trees to the shoulders.

Detail. Note how the colours differ from the photo on the kit

I’m enjoying it while I can, for it’s all about to come crashing to a halt. You see, we’re away on holiday later this week, and I’m not taking my knitting with me (it’s large and heavy and troublesome enough to count as a small child on the plane). We’re off to the States—I’ll be there just over a week, Margaret’s staying rather longer—so there’ll be no blog for a couple of weeks.

And remember, if you try to access the website and find anyone trying to persuade you that several million hectares of sand would make a great foundation for a new republic—just say no…

Gansey Nation will (probably) return on 28 October. Allahu Akbar!

(Note: when this blog first went live comments were inadvertently disabled. We apologise for the inconvenience.) 

There’s an old joke about the Government sending out letters to people about something important, like tax; and on the envelope there’s a message saying, If you can’t read this, get someone else to read it for you.

Well, this is going to sound a bit like that message. You see, we’ve been having website problems, with pages either not opening at all, or taking so long to open you get timed out. We’re looking into it, and are trying a couple of fixes, but we’d really like to know if they’re working, or if you’re having trouble accessing the site. (Of course, like that joke, if you can’t access the site you’re not even going to be able to read this, but one thing at a time.)

You can either let me know in a comment, or email me directly at Gordon@ganseys.com.

Meanwhile, I knit away, and at the same time try to answer an ancient philosophical conundrum: if an archivist blogs on the internet and no one can read it, does he still exist? (We’ve also added the Seaspray Filey gansey to the gallery; if you can access anything, you can access it here.)

Fancy, a shag

This week I’ve completed another tree, and am about halfway up the body. I’m really enjoying this pattern, partly because it looks damn fine, but mostly because it’s very easy to knit. Once you start a row and get the number of plain stitches between the half-diamonds and the trees in each pattern repeat sorted out, you just keep going. It’s the least stressful gansey to knit I can remember: there aren’t even any cable rows to count.

Now the equinox has been and gone, we in the northern hemisphere are entering a chilly, damp autumn. But while summer lingered like a favourite aunt we paid a visit to the celebrated Hill o’ Many Stanes (“hill of many stones”), about 9 miles south of Wick. It’s a Bronze Age site, with some 200-odd small upright stones more or less arranged in rows.

There are many ancient monuments dotted around the Caithness countryside and, to be honest, some of them are more impressive than others. At first sight, this one’s a little underwhelming, even after walking round it and staring at it for several minutes. I’d hoped that it might spell a very rude word if you caught it from the right angle, or work like one of those magic eye pictures, but no such luck: it’s basically just a bunch of rocks in a field.

Rhodion by Elizabeth Freeman

But the people who lived here several thousand years ago took the trouble to stick 200 stones in the ground in this arrangement. Was it a prehistoric observatory? A rockery? Bronze Age art?

I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite novels by the late Iain Banks, The Crow Road. In it one character tells his children a story about the origin of ancient Scottish cairns: once upon a time there were giant mammoth-like creatures (called “mythosaurs”) that swallowed great stones to keep in their crops, like geese do with pebbles to break down their food. When the creatures died, their bodies decayed leaving only the stones, which we call cairns.

You decide . . .

Isn’t that great? There are many reasons to love Iain Banks, but that’s one of my favourites. And so, in the same vein, I’ve been wondering what might have caused the Hill o’ Many Stanes: flying reptiles dropping rocks on rabbits? A pixies’ cemetery? Someone who noticed the flat landscape of Caithness and thought you could grow mountains like potatoes? A baby troll day care centre massacre when they were all cut down by the sunlight in the middle of a group tai chi lesson…? The truth is out there, people; or if not the truth, something much more fun.

Finally this week, Margaret has been making another of her beautiful lacy shawly creations. At least, I think that’s what it is. I thought at first it might be an elvish fishing net, but I’m slowly coming round to the idea that it’s lingerie for Galadriel…